Tonight one of my friends asked for a quick way to filter a stream, which consisted of lines like 

wheeeeeeee:CPONKT:shiubi=diubi

[download]
He needed to get everything that followed :CPONKT: and print it. Standard Perl stuff.

So me and my other two friends quickly made a brainstorming session (this was happening on IRC) and we came up with the following (untested) solutions:

  1. perl -e 'while(<STDIN>){/:CPONKT:(.*)/; print $1;}'
  2. perl -en 'print {split /:CPONKT:/}[1]'
  3. perl -nep '/:CPONKT:(.*)/;$_=$1;'
  4. perl -ne "/:CPONKT:(.*)/ && print $1;"
  5. perl -nep 's/:CPONKT:(.*)/$1/;'
  6. perl -pne "/:CPONKT:/;$_=$'";

Of course, some of these solutions look a bit fishy (like the split one), but I was really amazed about the TIMTOWTDI effect. It is the first time that I see this so explicitly. It also shows that different programmers think differently, which is also pretty unusual for me, as I come from PHP background. Sure, I've heard of TIMTOWTDI before, but today it has opened my eyes ;)

How would you solve the problem? Are there still more ways of solving this particular task?

In reply to TIMTOWTDI effect by moxliukas

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